The prevalence of electronic devices has increased the need for connectivity. For example, most electronic devices include wireless component landline, cable and Internet capabilities to enable connectivity via technologies and/or protocols such as Bluetooth, session initiation protocol (SIP), Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), etc. Many carriers have emerged to facilitate connectivity via the Internet, Bluetooth, landline connection, SIP, VoIP and the like.
VoIP technology has become a growing segment of technology in the past few years. The emergence of VoIP carriers has led to competition between VoIP carriers. As a result, the need for measuring competitive performance has increased to enable VoIP carriers to improve their services, increase their market share and become more competitive in the market. For example, measuring competitive performance such as monitoring market share of various VoIP carriers over a period of time in a given geographical area may enable VoIP carriers to launch efficient marketing campaigns, to efficiently plan capital investments and the like.
In other words, measuring competitive performance such as the market share of VoIP carriers may be used to better understand the structure of their respective markets. Understanding competitive performance has become an integral part of virtually every business structure, enabling businesses to modify their products and services to achieve highest possible efficiency and to become more competitive given their resources. Understanding competitive performance of VoIP carriers has become even more important given the recent explosion of the number of VoIP carriers in recent years.
To measure competitive performance such as market share, most VoIP carriers have relied on surveys. Typically, a surveyor places a call and gathers data from customers directly. Other methods for measuring market share information include gathering information through online surveys (e.g., e-mailing surveys or survey through a website). Thus, surveying customers to measure a market share of a VoIP carrier requires a subscriber's participation.
Unfortunately, the manual process of surveying customers to measure market share of VoIP carriers is inaccurate, time consuming and expensive. For example, customers may often be confused about the identity of the VoIP carrier they use for a particular communication service and, as a result, may provide the wrong information. Furthermore, manual surveying is prone to non-response from customers, thereby presenting difficulties in making the response data representative of the population surveyed.
Still further, a manual survey process is expensive to implement. For example, manual surveying requires significant cost to reach a sample size that provides statistically significant and/or accurate information. Moreover, manual surveying does not enable VoIP carriers to economically determine the number of added subscribers or lost subscribers. In other words, manual surveying fails to provide real-time transparency of the market share of a VoIP carrier, the number of added subscribers or the number of lost subscribers.